Monster Tribe

The controls are ridiculous. The game concept isn't bad but the execution isn't particularly good.

Monster Tribe is like if Pokemon and Stardew Valley had a quirky crossover love child with more than enough unique charm to stand on its own. You're able to explore a lot of the world, with one of the most enjoyable parts being waiting to see which creatures wait around each corner. I find the art style really cute and I like how smooth and responsive the gameplay feels, it was surprising to me to find out how few people worked on it. I'd recommend this to anyone seeking a new adventure in an original game.

The text is hard as hell to read.

10 tons of loredump at the start, the font is horrific to read (on 1440p), painted 6 rocks, got high on a cliff and then played an arcade machine against some red thing. No idea what on earth I just tried to play. I think whatever was in my "ceremonial pipe" has affected me through the screen and I do not feel well.

I logged out of my game one day and came back to next to find all of my monsters had disappeared, including the ones in my party, making the game unplayable, as every time I encountered any monsters my game would immediately crash. And I am having another bug where every time I try to save and quit it also crashes. This game is a half finished mess and it does not look like it will be receiving any updates or bug fixes in the future. The game has grinding and the main problem with this is the game likes to not tell you where to get said resources. I do not expect the game to tell me where every last thing is, but considering the wiki is a barely made mess, it makes it very hard to find where things are.

Monster Tribe is trying to be an open world creature collector game, instead you spend a good chunk of time collecting resources. You even get scared of making any monsters, in fear of need some resource for a quest or open a path. And the tools are annoying. There's 3 (fishing rod, axe, and pickaxe) with 4 different upgrades, so you juggle around 12 tools trying to find the right one for the resource you're currently griding/farming. I like the idea of of making the monsters from resources, it gives me ideas for my own project. I spend more time resource gathering than fighting the monsters. You have 5 main quests, to go these towers, but you also get quests to be able to get to the towers, but those quests arn't marked just the towers, so you'll end up writing them down just to keep of the resources you need to farm. The combat system is interesting, fun in a way, but monster fights range from boringly easy to boringly hard. Ether I have to sit through a buch of one round kils or a 10 minute normal monster fight. The game is so frecking buggy. It randomly crashes during fight, always crash when i try to close it, and always always crashes if all four of your monsters lvl up at the same time. Honestly all the resource farming and trying to locate the right resource, kind of killed the game for me and all the crashes.

so far very fun, kind of a grind which is a plus in my book but game has crashed on me while going through my journal and the DNA menu for obtaining new monsties.

Not very good. Maps are way too big even the towns have massive amounts of blank space between them so going to the houses you need to go is difficult especially since there are barely any landmarks other than some random statues. Combat feel braindead. I'm sure there's more to the combat than what I got but considering one of the first things I did was waltz over to the fire area and proceeded to dominate with zero strategy to speak of I think that some revamping of the combat system is warranted, at least in the early areas. Collecting creatures is a chore. You need to revive them which requires certain resources, most of them are gathered from the overworld but a good amount are drops from the monsters you fight in the overworld. Different types of monsters give different types of drops but most of them seem to be rare drops and since you can't influence the types of monsters that you encounter to any meaningful measure you'll just have to grind your balls off to get anything done. The story is, well it is. I don't have much to say other than that it just kinda happens, like seriously. The opening is all about these spirit things that I can't be bothered to remember the name of that are all mystical and mysterious only for you to perform a grand total of one ritual after which the literal guides of said spirits yeets you into a futuristic laboratory that for some reason is inside of your primitive village, shoves one of those spirits into your party and tells you to fight more of those spirits. This all happens in the span of like 30 minutes tops. All of these things wouldn't be much of a game breaker for me, I like myself some grindy games so while I do have a lot of critiscism if it was just for this I would've just kept playing and forgotten about it afterwards. The reason I'm giving this review however is because I encountered a gamebreaking bug. In the before mentioned fire area there's a required quest where you need to repair some rails so after clearing out the fires and collecting the resources needed to repair the rails I found that I couldn't interact with them anymore. I could interact with them after I had cleared the fires, that's how I learned which resources I needed to collect but after that I couldn't anymore. Reloading the area and restarting the game didn't work so here I am with a refund pending and a negative review.

Crashing and losing progress is not ok. Needs some bug fixing before I'll open it again.

I have really enjoyed what I've played so far of this game. The monsters are unique and the battle system is fun. It has lovely art and decent music. However, the harvesting is extremely tedious and for such a large area to explore I wish the character could move a little faster or run. There is a "dash" but it is more like a dodge or jump. If those were my only issues I would still give the game a positive review but it crashed within an hour of playing it, luckily it saves every 15 minutes so I didn't lose much progress. I just can't recommend this game when it crashed 2 times within the 1.6 hours I played. There are many other monster taming games in the market so until they fix the crashes I wouldn't recommend buying this one.